11Mar05 (Monthenor): As a grad student, "spring break" means even less to me than "weekend" does...each day of slack flows into the next. Nevertheless, it is tradition for me to not leave the apartment and play shit-tons of video games and that is precisely what I plan to do.

My room is so quiet now. I've gotten used to sleeping and working with what amounted to a tiny bandsaw running inside my PC case. When it shut itself down on Tuesday -- mere seconds before an Inuyasha ep I hadn't seen yet, no less -- the room was suddenly full to brimming with a silence that I couldn't handle. When I finally got time to work on it Thursday I excavated a tiny mountain of dust from the CPU fan. We're talking a dozen q-tips worth of maple-syrup-smelling linty foulness, collected over the many months of constant operation. This little kindness couldn't convince it to boot up again, though. I'm pretty sure a new fan will solve it...there's definitely power going to the machine, so overheating is all it could be.

I've got a new super-fan on the way. It's properly measured for my motherboard so I don't have to bend anything, and all reports say that it's whisper-quiet. I hope it's not actually that quiet...I've been having trouble getting to sleep without that sporadic hideous grinding noise.